Despite quickly becoming obsolete, the early ZX computers (ZX80 and ZX81) were a marvel of cost-benefit at the time. Most people had no access to computing of any kind... The difference between no computing and a machine that can perform thousands of operations per second is massive.
Can we now have all the Infocom games owned by Activision (which is yours) now? Pretty please? I know the source is available, but we'd like them with a MIT license (including the manuals, artwork etc).
PS: a couple of them could be harder, like Shogun, but it's okay to skip these.
It's because of the artists. The Amiga was a much more affordable art-making machine, so many artists made graphics ON the Amiga FOR the Amiga. There were even some good-looking VGA games that under utilized the PC's capabilities because they were essentially converted Amiga games.
I banned the Oxford comma in all writing within my individual business. In fact, I released an entire 100K+ word narrative game without using Oxford commas (I consider it a bug if I left any behind).
Those were the days. I still believe nothing replaces the camraderie of the small, local BBSs. The large ones were good too, but these tended to resemble the modern Internet forums a bit more.
Some acoustic music instruments have fairly simple base waveforms which are "colored" by their shape and acoustics. I've once spent a few hours passing basic sound through modern effect VSTs with interesting results. I loved the video.
This is an incredible find. It would be amazingly cool if we could create an emulated environment for compiling and running Unix v4 from these sources.
I own the poster version ("The Art of Atari, the poster collection") and it's great. I have three of their posters hanging in my office right now. It's not just nostalgia, the art is terrific.
EDIT: the poster collection now costs $600+ on Amazon. Wow.
You're right. My comparison was more about sculptures as art vs the games as art. If you don't believe them to be equivalent at some level, it would be difficult to find this preservation work worthwhile.
That said, unfinished games are similar to manuscripts of an unfinished book. Many such manuscripts have been published throughout history and are, in my opinion, part of our cultural heritage too.
Humanity has done a decent job at preserving artifacts from our past despite wars and the effects of time on our cultural output. Throughout history, books, paintings, sculptures, music, and other forms of art were the available outlets for artistic and creative people. With the rise of computers, video games joined the set of cultural works produced by our species. While one could argue that the artistic value of David and Pac-Man is not comparable, I prefer to adopt a more open-minded view of games. It's great that some people are giving video games proper attention, considering the enormous amount of time we spend playing them and the place they occupy in our childhood memories.
I actually wrote my first toy multitasker on a Gameboy Advance, although that's ARM7... Great little project. It's a joy to develop on an emulator with good debugging tools.
If you like CYOA games, you may enjoy my upcoming game Outsider, a modern sci-fi take on dynamic narrative games. It will launch in 7 weeks and I'm working on it full-time!
Website: galantrix.com Contact: [email protected]